Hello my name is Scott McArthur and I am a Senior Support Escalation Engineer in the Windows group. Today we are going to discuss the steps to activate Windows Server 2008 Core edition using a MAK key via the phone. It is much easier to activate via the Internet but for those computers that do not have access to the Internet (for example a Hyper-V virtual machine) you can use the phone. If you have more than one machine to activate you may want to look at the Volume Activation Management Tool 1.1. This supports batch activation for computers not connected to the Internet. This is very useful for isolated lab scenarios.

The steps in this blog are specific to core edition and a MAK Key but the same general steps could be applied to the non-core edition and other types of keys. In order to activate with a MAK key you must install using volume license media. By default volume license media will look for a KMS host to activate and do not require a key to install. If you are prompted during setup for a key then you are not installing from volume license media.

After Windows Server 2008 Core Edition is installed do the following at a cmd prompt

1. Install your MAK key using slmgr.vbs

slmgr.vbs -ipk XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Where XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX is your 5×5 MAK key supplied by Microsoft

You should receive the following confirmation:

2. View your Installation ID

slmgr.vbs -dti

Note: the –DTI option only shows up when you have installed a MAK or Retail key.

You will get the following dialogue box that has your Installation ID

Tip: The Installation ID is a 9×6 number. An easy way to split it up so it is easier to read back to the phone activation system is to hit CTRL-C to copy the contents of the dialogue box and paste into notepad. In notepad it will be broken out into the 9×6 groups and easier to read. For example